Unbundled territoriality and regional politics

One of the purposes of this journal is to respond to and provide a publishing outlet for research on the politics of regional development and multilevel governance. Studying the political economy of regions within countries has expanded considerably in recent years. More specifically, from the perspective of this journal, the political in the political economy of regions has lost its subsidiary status to that of economy. At the same time, studying the politics of regions or regionalism has also undergone some major changes. One of the most notable is the resituating of regions within global and continental contexts (e.g. Agnew 2013; Hooghe and Marks 2001). Globalization and the growth of supranational agencies and agreements are seen as exacerbating rather than attenuating regional differences and in turn eliciting significant political responses ranging from popular protests through regional competition policies to, in a few cases, the threat and then the reality of regional secession. This can be construed as part of the ‘territory debordering territoriality’ referred to by Saskia Sassen (2013) in which territory can be seen as defining vectors not monopolized by the borders of particular states or, in a different formulation, that legal jurisdiction and the organizational structures (of various public and private actors) are not restricted to state territories.

SUB-NATIONAL REGIONS BEYOND THEIR STATES

This is a novel way of thinking even though the phenomena it describes have a much longer history than the so-called globalization era from the 1970s to the present. States have never been the absolute rulers of territory that much political theory would have them be (e.g. Agnew 2009; Bartolini 2004). In the past, however, regions have been seen predominantly as sub-national entities nestled within singular national contexts. The entire discourse of regional studies until recently tended to frame regional differences entirely within national contexts. In the era of organized capitalism, particularly after the Second World War and down until the 1970s, the regional question was part of a national question in which central governments intervened in an endeavour to bring backward regions up to par with their presumably modern peers. Nations could only be built if regional differences in production and consumption were suppressed. Yet, as critics were quick to point out, the wealth of some regions within countries was dialectically related to the poverty of others. Interventions would always founder on the reality that regions always perform different economic roles (centres of manufacturing, sites of resources, etc.) because of agglomeration economies and so on and these differences can never be erased by the tinkering around associated with regional policies.

With the adoption of neo-liberal national economic policies beginning in the 1980s, regions like countries were now seen as in competition with one another in the face of the loosening of restrictions on trade and the flexibility of exchange rates coming out of the 1970s (Peck 2013). In fact, the commitment of central governments to the reduction of sub-national regional inequalities was now viewed as perverse. As Franco Cassano (2009, 16) puts it: ‘in the name of a generous utopia [this commitment] ended up dissipating resources and penalizing those social classes and regions most active in favor of those most passive and unable to produce wealth’. In a reversal of the dependency dialectic, rich regions were now seen as being undermined by redistributive transfers to poor ones. The emphasis now went to improving the ‘quality’ of regional institutions, the ability of local managers, and what can be called ‘the regionalizing of reason’: attending to regional strengths and bottlenecks seen from within the region rather than from outside. Of course, competition between regions could neither eliminate the fact that regions were starting out from different positions in terms of advantages and disadvantages but also were situated in broader spatial contexts beyond that of the countries to which they belonged. We may have gone from a world of national ‘class struggle’ to one of inter-place competition (Lussault 2009). But this is still a world of ‘territorial hierarchy’, if one increasingly of global and continental and not just national dimensions.

THE ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE

The articles in this issue suggest some important caveats to this general rethinking of sub-national regions. In sequence they tell us the following: decentralization and liberalization can be at odds, territorial hierarchies do not always work by new levels of government simply replacing old ones, old political practices that often exercise drag on regional development have hardly disappeared, threats of secession from angry regions undermine efforts at improving governance, and protest movements do not ‘take off’ into something more substantive if they remain wedded to their original sites and do not move out and mobilize wider populations.

In the lead-off article, Kent Eaton (2015) shows how much national neo-liberal policies combined with regional decentralization in Peru to produce effects somewhat different from those one might predict from much writing about the presumed universal effects of neo-liberal policies. In that construction, common to ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ of such policies alike, regions go along with the neo-liberal imperatives. As he notes, however, the trends of liberalization and decentralization ‘clashed’ more than reinforced one another, giving rise to considerable regional-level pushback against national policies. This has subsequently produced a stalemate or indeterminacy that has increased political dissonance but without undermining the national policies themselves. Within the context of the European Union, Anna-Lena Högenauer (2015) illustrates how much different regions must now rely on lobbying in Brussels to pursue their goals. She shows how much they rely on technical claims to justify their requests and how much they need ‘mediators’ to make their cases. The political interests of regions, therefore, are dependent in this hierarchical context on being able to mobilize lobbying resources up the chain to gain leverage. Their central governments remain very much at the core of this process. The ‘Europe of regions’ in which regions do ‘end runs’ around central government remains a chimera. The framing of interests still depends crucially on the nestling of regions within states (see also Keating 2014; Cole and Pasquier 2015).

Students of territorial politics have long focused on the ways in which local and regional representatives go off to the capital city to ‘bring back the bacon’ for local populations (e.g. Bensel 1984; Kenny 2015; Rogowski 1989) and how these have been affected or not by globalization (e.g. Van Houtum 2003). The logic of regional politics in this vein has never fit very well with the logic of regional development thought of in either its centre-helping-out-the- periphery or competitive modes. Yet, much election campaign funding and electoral messaging are still directed at what is essentially patronage politics organized at local and regional levels. This is true in the USA even as ideological polarization has produced one political party, the Republican, seemingly devoted to rolling back ‘pork-barrel’ politics as part of its ‘war’ on the federal government. In Italy, Greece and elsewhere, some of the recent sovereign-debt crisis is put down to the depredations of patronage politics based on tax evasion, over-hiring of government employees, and expenditures delivered to electoral constituencies rather than on a transparent basis to citizens at large. Even so, patronage or clientelism is not invariably venal. If middle-class moralism always paints it so, patronage politics can sometimes be virtuous, as Simona Piattoni (2007) has pointed out in her comparative studies of Italy's southern administrative regions.

In her contribution to this issue, Antonella Coco (2015) focuses on one aspect of territorialized patronage politics: the use by political and business elites in different Italian regions of the lack of a socially recognized distinction between private and public resources to pursue personal goals by political means. This ‘neo-patrimonialism’ covers a range of legal, illegal, and illicit activities including the manipulation of legal norms as well as corruption as conventionally defined. Though the study is oriented to attitudes more than behaviour, based as it is in a survey of viewpoints, the results show how much illegal practices permeate Italian local and regional government. Unsurprisingly to those who know anything much about Italian history and politics, it is the southern regions that report the highest rates of ‘norm manipulation’ and ‘illegality’ in both public and private sectors. Though the latter sector has lower rates everywhere even while reproducing the overall same regional patterning. Even as the European Union in Brussels has supplemented the national government in Rome as a source of the funds that grease the wheels of local spending across Italy, these attitudes (and behaviours) continue to breed resentment elsewhere and negative fiscal outcomes everywhere.

In northern Italy for a while it looked as if regional resentment might lead to either federalism or even secession from the rest of Italy. Neither option now seems likely. Nevertheless, the deep-seated enmities between regions that the Italian Northern League has exploited and fostered are not absent in other countries. Considerable research has shown that regionalist movements can achieve many of their goals short of independence (e.g. Sorens 2008) and that independence does not always prove to be what it is cracked up to be (Rodriguez-Pose and Stermsek 2015). In their article in this issue, Andreas Kyriacou and Noemi Morral-Palacin (2015) examine the question of regional secession from the perspective of how it affects efforts within the existing polity to improve the ‘quality’ of governance with respect to such elements as corruption, respect for law, and the quality of bureaucracy. For 22 countries (OECD members), their results suggest that secessionism tends to detract politically from efforts to improve governance nationwide. Quite why this is so remains controversial. Some of it may be put down to increased ‘lack of trust’ but perhaps more importantly national-government instability is enhanced by secessionist threats.

Finally, if politics always sits in places it can become associated with some localized sites to the detriment of mobilizing broader publics for political change. Much of the literature on regional policies and territorial politics retains a strong structural flavour: this or that ‘force’ – for example, capital or neo-liberalism as a set of ideas – is moving the constellation of regions in a certain determinative direction. Agency receives short shrift. It is all too contingent. Yet we know from historical examples that the seeding of political movements does not always produce wider affiliations and political success. How can movements that sprout in certain places at crucial moments go on to greater success? Clifford Deaton (2015) tells us that the type of place matters. Drawing an analogy to the failed Occupy movements of recent vintage in New York City and elsewhere, he demonstrates that movements need to articulate linkages to places of memory (he terms them ‘secondary spaces’) within the cities that are the initial sites of mass movements. In this way, new movements can tie themselves into historical narratives that extend beyond the moment and provide the basis for wider popular mobilizations. Tehran in 2009, Prague in 1989 and Paris in 1968 provide the repertoire of cases. The broader message in relation to this issue of the journal is that ultimately political change involves the activation of popular agency and regions (and their states) cannot be simply viewed in structural-determinist terms. Their populations must be mobilized for substantive political change to happen.